VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought
Abstract
In the UK, student belonging generated within the academic sphere of university life is central to student retention discourse (Thomas, 2012; Tinto, 2017). Gravett and Ajjawi (2021) describe this as either an emotional connection, of ‘feeling at home’ (Quinn, 2010, p. 87), or as an act of self-identification or identification by others (Yuval-Davis in Gravett and Ajjawi, 2021, p. 2), reflecting the basic human need to matter (Flett, 2018). This has sparked interest in how universities foster meaningful relationships and how belonging is intertwined with the contested concept of identity (Grosz, 1994; Wenger, 1983; Whitchurch, 2013) and the traditionally understood sense of agency as the extent to which human capacities enable belonging. However, what if belonging arises from the ‘intra-active’ entanglements of the natural, socio-cultural, and material world, rather than from the sense of independent human free will? In this context, belonging might emerge through ‘distributive agency,’ where in/organic entities and bodies collaborate, cooperate, or interfere with forces and elements to produce materialities (Bennett, 2010, p. 21). This raises the question: What does ‘distributive agency’ mean for pedagogy? This presentation will explore how a ‘diffractive analysis’ (Barad, 2007) and the ‘thing-power’ of everyday items affected HE experiences of undergraduate students. This emphasises the need for relational pedagogies that embrace nomadic praxis to challenge the privileging of certain knowledge(s) over others and to recognize the ‘objects, bodies, and spaces that constitute the material mattering of learning and teaching as an in-situ practice of relationality’ (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild, 2021, pp. 6-9).
Sarah Parkes is Reader in Collaborative Pedagogies and Practice at Birmingham Newman University. She teaches and supports learners across a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading the university’s Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice and the Continuing Professional Development route to Fellowship against the Professional Standards Framework 2023. She is a UK National Teaching Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Newman Distinguished Teaching Fellow and an Advance HE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence winner.